A week after the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, her face can be seen on posters at protests from Istanbul to Los Angeles - video of her final moments has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times.
The young Iranian woman was shown on cameraphone footage dying - apparently shot - on the edges of an opposition protest in Tehran.
Foreign media have been banned from covering the political demonstrations in Tehran and are subject to Iranian restrictions on their ability to report, film or take pictures.
Increasingly, the trickle of information comes from people like the one on whose cameraphone Neda Agha-Soltan's death was recorded.
Iran has more internet connections than any country in the Middle East - sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Youtube have come to the fore as the foreign media ban has tightened.
In the early days after the election, the micro-blogging site Twitter was a prominent venue for the cat-and-mouse game of finding internet proxies for use by people whose access from Iran was blocked.
Such proxy servers can allow Iranians to escape the local restrictions on internet access and many Twitter users posted web addresses to help Iranians evade government filtering.
Such was Twitter's perceived importance, the US State Department has admitted contacting the site in advance of the election to urge it to delay scheduled maintenance.
'We highlighted to them that this was an important form of communication,' said a US State Department official.
And in response to popular demand, Google Earth has updated its satellite image of Tehran, in principle to allow people to better see what is happening.
A journalistic problem with images of demonstrations and violence is that besides what can be seen or technologically verified, the context of events or the identities of those involved often cannot be independently proven.
Some sources check what is offered, starting with knowing their contributors, contacting them by email where possible and using whatever metadata the images carry to verify when, and increasingly where, they were taken.
'We have to hold ourselves to the same journalistic standards as the mainstream press,' said Jonathan Tepper, Chief operating officer of photo website Demotix, which has supplied several photos from people in Iran to mainstream media in recent days.
'Things that are true tend to be self-reinforcing,' he told Reuters, referring to the multiplicity of shots that come in from a given event.
But those with longer experience of social networking sites see a more complex dynamic.
Jeff Jarvis, author and professor of interactive journalism at the City University of New York, said the events show how Twitter, by making its code freely available to people for manipulation into useful tools was, he claimed, becoming indispensable.
'But it's by no means the final word in digital revolutions. I know we will soon see witnesses and participants to events such as these broadcasting them live from their mobile phones.'
